Life is a series of numerous adversities and trials. People often despair when they lose sight of a better life and hope for the future. The number of deaths due to alcohol, drug overdoses, and suicide, desiring to forget one's desperate reality, increases every year.
Economist Angus Deaton (1945~) calls them 'deaths of despair'. Despair, which is emerging as a new social problem, refers to a kind of ‘social death’ in which the poor, exhausted from life amidst the widening gap between the rich and the poor, end their lives by suicide, drug addiction, or alcoholism due to accumulated psychological pain.
It goes without saying that securing an economic and social safety net, as well as devising countermeasures, are urgently needed to prevent such deaths. However, the key point to consider here is whether we can truly escape despair simply because external problems are resolved. People try to resolve despair by connecting it to external obstacles. However, despair is a more fundamental existential phenomenon of humans, and it cannot be wholly overcome just by removing external obstacles.
The philosopher who examined despair as a fundamental phenomenon of human existence is Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855). He diagnosed the modern era as an ‘age of despair’, and in “The Sickness Unto Death”, he considers despair as a significant opportunity for ‘becoming oneself’ to acquire one’s original self.
Despair is a synthesis of the ‘relationship with oneself’, the imbalance that comes from relating the soul and the body, the finite and the infinite, the temporal and the eternal, freedom and necessity in one’s life. It means ‘self-destruction’ that exhausts oneself to the point where one cannot do anything, and a ‘sinful situation’ that comes from the severance of one’s relationship with God.
Kierkegaard defines the despair from this ‘disorder as a ‘disease of self-relationship'. However, the important fact is that despair is so painful and dangerous that one can die, and no one can avoid it, but no one dies because of it. Despair is a ‘disease that leads to death’, but unlike a disease of the body, it is a disease of the soul, an ‘existential disease’ that leads to a state where one dies but cannot die, that is, one cannot even hope for death. Nevertheless, Kierkegaard argues that 'despair never erodes one’s eternity under any circumstances'.
Despair is not a disease that only a select few people experience, but a phenomenon that all existing human beings experience. Humans are fundamentally in despair, but they often fail to recognize this despair and usually avoid it or rebel against it.
It is a failure in not relating to oneself properly. An unconscious self-sabotaging behavior because of some unresolved trauma from the past. And the need to actively confront this improper relationship with oneself.
The restoration of a misaligned self-relation lies in standing alone before God with 'existential conscience' without hypocrisy. Existential conscience is based on 'authenticity' and 'self-responsibility' that sees oneself transparently without self-deception or pretense.
For those who genuinely pursue their true selves, life is not a calm sea but a fierce storm, and the truth is suffering. Therefore, philosophical counseling plays the role of helping those who bear the heavy burdens of life, especially when they are in despair due to pain, to cultivate the capacity to make their own decisions about their lives through self-reflection and to embrace their unique existence.
